Update: Somehow this is a relatively popular post.  It was originally intended only for documenting how to renew your IP by scripting, but I have received a few request for simply documenting how to do it manually.  Instructions for this are at the end of the article.

I’ve been a pretty big fan of the open sourced Java program JDownloader, which basically allows you to paste in links to files anywhere on the web and it will download them. This is very useful for downloading files one at a time, throttling, and many other great reasons.

Many hosts will limit the amount of data a certain user may download in a certain period of time by IP address. I recently found out that JD has a feature that will log into your modem and perform a reconnect which results in a new IP address. I was able to get this to work with my Linksys router, but not on my piece of junk AT&T 2701HG-B 2Wire Wireless Gateway DSL Router Modem.

JDownloader has a preset for this modem, but it did not work for me. It has the ability to create a macro of you performing the reset, but that didn’t seem to work either.  In fact, it resulted in JD crashing or freezing each time.  I took the time to study how the piece of junk (The modem, not JD) works and understand the HSRC HTTP macro format, or whatever it is.

The modem uses one main ‘index’ page, if you will, that accepts a page parameter which tells it which action to perform.  I assume it uses XSLT (based on the urls) to format the output of each action.  In addition to the PAGE parameter, it also passes around the THISPAGE and NEXTPAGE variables.  Some of the pages use GET while some use POST.  In most cases I was able to use GET instead of POST.  The forms duplicate parameters out the Ying-Yang which is one thing thatI think ma yhave caused the freezing.

A given page url might look like: http://192.168.1.254/xslt?PAGE=B01&THISPAGE=A06&NEXTPAGE=B01

Some of the primary page actions are:
A01 System Summary
A08 Restart System
A07 Gateway View details
B01 Connection Summary
C01 Network Summary

So anyways, I put together the HSRC macro script which has worked great so far (1 hour!)  Here it is:

I’ll have to do about three thousand automatic reconnects for this to have resulted in in a positive time expense. Hopefully if you can use this it will count for something! Please let me know

Manually Renewing Your IP Address on the AT&T 2701HG-B 2Wire

For the beginners.

1. In your web browser (Hopefully Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, or Opera) enter in either the address http://192.168.1.254 or http://gateway.2wire.net.
2. In the ‘Network at a Glance‘ box, select ‘View Details‘ for your gateway.
3. Select ‘Restart the System‘.
4. You will (most likely) be asked to enter in your password.  This password is probably not the same as the password to use your wireless network, but could be.  It is possible it is blank if you have never set it, in which case you really need to.  If you do not know the password, you can hold the reset button on the router for 30 seconds and do a full reset.
5. Once your password has been verified, confirm that you want to restart.
   Note: You along with everybody else on your network will be disconnected from the Internet for about two minutes.
6. After about two minutes, your computer should reconnect automatically.  If it does not, try either toggling your wireless if you know how or simply restart your computer.